The fall of Avdiivka – the start of Ukraine’s year of slow retreat in the east
The occupation of Avdiivka, an industrial town in eastern Ukraine, was the Russian military’s biggest gain since its capture of Bakhmut nine months earlier and set the tone for Ukraine’s year of slow and demoralising retreat in Donetsk region.
As in Bakhmut, what Russia actually claimed in Avdiivka was largely abandoned ruins, but its fall strengthened the invasion force’s tactical and logistical positions in the area and pushed Ukraine’s army away from the major city of Donetsk, which has been under de facto Russian control since the start of the conflict in 2014.
The loss of Avdiivka, site of Ukraine’s biggest (and now destroyed) producer of industrial coking coal, sapped the spirit of Ukrainian troops who had held it through eight years of low-level conflict and nearly two years of full-scale war, and sharpened debate in Ukraine over the human cost of the conflict and the strength of US support.
Officials in Kyiv and Washington said a six-month halt to US military aid to Ukraine, caused by Republican allies of Donald Trump blocking White House funding requests, played a significant role in the fall of Avdiivka and in Ukraine’s struggle to hold other areas of the front line early this year as basic artillery ammunition dwindled away.
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Another key factor in Avdiivka was Russia’s use of massive “glide bombs” that obliterated even fortified Ukrainian positions in the town and would prove to be an unstoppable element of Moscow’s arsenal through the year.
By fitting small wings and a GPS guidance kit to Soviet-era bombs – of which it has thousands in its stockpiles – Russia made a cheap but effective guided weapon that weighs 500kg-3,000kg and cannot be countered by Ukraine’s limited air defences.
Russian planes now drop them every day from a safe range of 50km or more, hitting Ukrainian units on the battlefield and residential areas of front-line cities such as Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia, killing, maiming and terrorising troops and civilians alike.
Military reforms fail to replenish Ukraine’s weary and wounded ranks
The loss of Avdiivka also highlighted the scale of the Ukrainian military’s personnel problem. Some units defending the town had been there for nearly two years with little or no break, and soldiers who withdrew from the area say sheer exhaustion and a sense of despair were widespread as Russia’s bigger, fresher forces closed in.
Volunteers surged into the military in the first months of the full-scale war in early 2022, swelling the number of people in Ukraine’s uniformed ranks to about one million.
Yet the burden of combat duty was not shared equally, fuelling disillusionment among many soldiers and their families that was only sharpened by daily reports of people buying medical or other exemptions from military service, and of officials involved in the conscription process growing rich on bribes from draft dodgers.
[ Trump says Ukraine ‘needs to reach deal’ with RussiaOpens in new window ]
Valery Zaluzhnyi was replaced in February as the country’s top military commander, amid reports that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy baulked at his reported request for an additional 450,000-500,000 conscripts.
Zaluzhnyi denied naming such a figure but his replacement, Oleksandr Syrskyi, quickly shifted the onus away from further mobilisation and on to reforming a system in which a vast number of soldiers could spend years quietly working at a desk or guarding a base far from the front line, while their comrades faced months on end in harm’s way.
Ukraine finally overhauled its mobilisation rules in April, lowering the conscription age to 25 from 27, making fewer people exempt and increasing punishments for draft dodgers. Frontline soldiers also got a pay rise, but not a sought-after guarantee that conscripts would be released after 36 months of service.
The number and quality of new recruits have not been sufficient to address Ukraine’s manpower problem, however, and the rate of desertion has only increased: of nearly 95,000 criminal cases opened since 2022 for desertion and going absent without leave, more than 60,000 were opened this year.
Russia faces similar problems and has suffered bigger losses, but having a population four times bigger than that of Ukraine helps cushion their impact. Now US officials are urging Ukraine to consider lowering its draft age to 18 – which Kyiv says would be pointless because it does not have enough weapons to equip them.
The Kursk operation – Putin’s war comes home as Ukraine invades Russia
Ukraine struggled all year to stabilise the front line in Donetsk region and, after taking Avdiivka, Russia made its next priority a small city 50km to the west called Pokrovsk, which has also been a defence hub for a decade.
With all eyes on that axis in August, Kyiv’s troops launched a lightning attack on the Kursk region of Russia, which borders the Sumy province of northern Ukraine, and routed what little resistance they encountered.
It was a shock comparable to the revolt of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group in June 2023, when its leader Yevgeny Prigozhin abruptly pulled units from Ukraine and began moving towards Moscow amid a personal feud with defence chiefs there.
But while Wagner abandoned its rebellion after a day and relinquished control of areas seized, Ukraine swiftly captured more than 1,000sq km of Kursk region and still holds about half that area.
Kyiv says the operation thwarted Moscow’s plans to occupy part of Sumy region and create a “buffer zone” on the border; pinned down powerful Russian units that could otherwise have been deployed in eastern Ukraine; and showed the embarrassing vulnerability of Russia’s defences during a war that its president, Vladimir Putin, claims is only strengthening its security and stability.
The incursion failed in at least one key objective, however, because Russia did not withdraw forces from its main offensive in eastern Ukraine to bolster the defence of Kursk. The push towards Pokrovsk did not slacken, and any criticism of Putin from displaced residents of Kursk or among the wider Russian public had little impact in a country where the Kremlin controls the discussion in politics and the mass media.
Seeing Russian soldiers killed and captured on their own land and Ukraine’s flag flying over towns and villages in Kursk surely shook many senior people in Moscow, however. In fact, it prompted Putin to do something that was previously inconceivable: he invited thousands of North Korean troops to help defend western Russia.
North Korean troops, ‘experimental’ missiles and nuclear sabre-rattling – is the war going global?
When Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine shredded its already badly strained ties with the West, it set about deepening relations with China, Iran and North Korea. China allows “dual-use” civilian-military goods, including drones, to flow to Moscow, while Iran provides it with powerful attack drones and rockets and North Korea supplies artillery shells and missiles.
Russia signed a strategic partnership deal and mutual defence pact with North Korea this year, and last month Ukrainian, South Korean and western intelligence agencies confirmed that at least 10,000 North Korean troops had been deployed to Russia, and some had clashed for the first time with Kyiv’s forces in Kursk region.
South Korea suspects that, in return, impoverished and isolated Pyongyang is receiving air defence systems, oil and economic aid from Moscow – which would breach United Nations sanctions – and wants help with missile and satellite technology.
Western leaders say Putin’s involvement of North Korea in his invasion of Ukraine has escalated and expanded the reach of Europe’s biggest war in 80 years and could destabilise other parts of the world as global security issues become intertwined.
[ Zelenskiy says Russia is deploying more North Korean troops in KurskOpens in new window ]
The deployment of North Korean troops was a key factor in US president Joe Biden’s decision last month to let Ukraine strike Russia with US-supplied Atacms ballistic missiles, which Kyiv had been allowed to use only in occupied territory.
His move prompted Britain to give the same clearance for the Storm Shadow cruise missiles it supplies to Kyiv, and both systems were swiftly used to hit military targets in Russia.
Putin responded by striking an arms plant in the city of Dnipro in eastern Ukraine with what he called an experimental new intermediate-range ballistic missile called “Oreshnik”, which he claimed could not be stopped by any western air defence system.
He had warned that Moscow would regard Nato states as being directly involved in the war if they allowed Ukraine to hit Russia with their missiles, and he promptly lowered the Kremlin’s threshold for launching a nuclear strike against an adversary.
Kyiv and some western capitals dismiss Putin’s threats as mere bluff and intimidation; he says the conflict has now “acquired elements of a global nature”.
The return of president Trump – can he end the war ‘in one day”?
Donald Trump has not explained how he intends to make good on his repeated pledge to end the war in 24 hours, but comments from his team – including his special envoy on the conflict, retired US Army general Keith Kellogg – give a few possible pointers.
They have suggested freezing the front line, putting Kyiv’s request for Nato membership on hold and providing some sort of enhanced security to Ukraine to ward off any future Russian attack, possibly by dramatically boosting its defence capabilities.
If the warring parties are reluctant to talk, the Trump administration may threaten Ukraine with a complete halt to military aid, and warn Moscow that it will arm Kyiv to the teeth unless the Kremlin comes to the table.
Putin has said talks are possible only if Ukraine accepts the permanent loss of five regions – Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson – including areas that are not occupied, and abandons its Nato accession hopes forever.
Kyiv says those terms would amount to surrender, but it has slightly softened its rhetoric in recent months and, instead of pledging to expel Russia’s bigger forces from all occupied areas, now talks about achieving “peace through strength” and reclaiming territory over time through diplomacy.
The greatest danger for Ukraine is that Trump, who has expressed admiration for Putin and may be in a rush to clinch a deal, tries to force it to accept bad terms. Zelenskiy could not sign anything resembling capitulation; it would not be accepted by a bloodied nation that has suffered grievously for its freedom and independence.
Ukrainians are convinced that if Russia is not stopped and punished for its invasion and its war crimes, then it will continue to attack or perhaps pause, rearm and come back stronger.
At the end of another bitter year, no one wants peace more than Ukrainians – but not at any cost.
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